Whirty: Torriente, slavery, politics, the sugar trade, and the search for answers
From SABR member Ryan Whirty at Home Plate Don’t Move on January 21, 2016:
In early March 1938, a small cadre of dissidents were caught in an alleged plot to kill Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Among the group of conspirators was Cosme de la Torriente, a diplomat and statesman who had previously held several roles in post-independence Cuban government, including secretary of state and president of the ill-fated League of Nations.
It doesn’t look like de la Torriente suffered too much for his part in the alleged assassination; he went on to live a lengthy, comfortable life before passing away in Havana in December 1956.
Parallel to the machinations of the unsuccessful 1938 coup of Batista, though, was the death, in April of that year, of Cristobal Torriente, a native of Cuba and legendary star of the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues. By that time, Torriente — who in 2006 would be posthumously and very belatedly inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame — had faded into penniless obscurity in New York City and withered away from tuberculosis in NYC’s long-since-demolished and rather infamous Riverside Hospital on North Brother Island.
By all appearances, because of Torriente’s status as a pauper and ward of the state, he was unceremoniously dumped in a mass, unmarked, city-administered grave in Calvary Cemetery in Queens.
Read the full article here: https://homeplatedontmove.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/torriente-slavery-politics-the-sugar-trade-and-the-search-for-answers/
Originally published: January 25, 2016. Last Updated: January 25, 2016.